Contents

Air India Flight 101 was a scheduled flight from Bombay to London; and on the day of the accident was operated by a Boeing 707, registrationVT-DMN and named Kanchenjunga.[2] After leaving Bombay, it had made two scheduled stops at Delhi and Beirut and was en route to another stop at Geneva.[2] At Flight Level 190, the crew was instructed to descend for Geneva International Airport after the aircraft had passed Mont Blanc.[2] The pilot, thinking that he had passed Mont Blanc, started to descend and flew into the Mont Blanc massif in France near the Rochers de la Tournette, at an elevation of 4,750 metres (15,584 ft).[2][3] All 106 passengers and 11 crew were killed.[3]

At the time, aircrew fixed the position of their aircraft as being above Mont Blanc by taking a cross-bearing from one VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) as they flew along a track from another VOR. However, the accident aircraft departed Beirut with one of its VOR receivers unserviceable.[2][3]

a) The pilot-in-command, who knew on leaving Beirut that one of the VORs was unserviceable, miscalculated his position in relation to Mont Blanc and reported his own estimate of this position to the controller; the radar controller noted the error, determined the position of the aircraft correctly and passed a communication to the aircraft which, he believed, would enable it to correct its position.

b) For want of a sufficiently precise phraseology, the correction was mis-understood by the pilot who, under the mistaken impression that he had passed the ridge leading to the summit and was still at a flight level which afforded sufficient safety clearance over the top of Mont Blanc, continued his descent.

Wreckage of the crashed Boeing still remains at the crash site. In 2008, a climber found some Indian newspapers dated 23 January 1966. An engine from Air India Flight 245 was also discovered.

On 21 August 2012, a 9 kilograms (20 lb) jute bag of diplomatic mail, stamped "On Indian Government Service, Diplomatic Mail, Ministry of External Affairs", was recovered by a mountain rescue worker and turned over to local police in Chamonix.[6][7] An official with the Indian Embassy in Paris took custody of the mailbag, which was found to be a "Type C" diplomatic pouch meant for newspapers, periodicals, and personal letters. Indian diplomatic pouches "Type A" (classified information) and "Type B" (official communications) are still in use today; "Type C" mailbags were made obsolete with the advent of the internet.[8] The mailbag was found to contain, among other items, still-white and legible copies of The Hindu and The Statesman from mid-January 1966, Air India calendars, and a personal letter to the Indian consul-general in New York, C.G.K. Menon.[9] The bag was flown back to New Delhi on a regular Air India flight, in the charge of C. R. Barooah, the flight purser. His father, R.C. Barooah, was the flight engineer on Air India Flight 101.[10]

In September 2013 a French alpinist found a metal box containing the Air India logo at the site of the plane crash on Mont Blanc containing rubies, sapphires, and emeralds worth more than $300,000, which he handed in to the police to be returned to the rightful owners.[11] In her book Crash au mont Blanc, which tells the story of the two Air India crashes on Mont-Blanc (1950 and 1966), Françoise Rey writes about a box of emeralds sent to M. Issacharov, London, described by Lloyd's.[12]

On 22 June 2014 a camera belonging to one of the passengers was found in the Glacier des Bossons by another French alpinist. The film though present was too damaged to hope to retrieve pictures.